Various types of consumer appliances are designed with pull-out compartment drawers. For example, a number of popular refrigerator styles have a freezer compartment with one or more pull-out drawers that span the width of the appliance and include storage baskets or bins. Examples of these refrigerators include Profile™ French door and Armoire style refrigerators from General Electric Appliances. The conventional pull-out drawers typically include side brackets that are mounted to slides of a slide mechanism that, in turn, has a base member mounted to the compartment liner.
Due to their substantial width, depth, and weight, the pull-out drawers are susceptible to misalignment between the sides when moving the drawer into and out of the appliance compartment, particularly if the door is grasped off-center and the pulling/closing force is applied non-parallel to the slide structure. This misalignment may lead to binding or “racking” of the drawer, which may make further movement of the drawer difficult and may also lead to an improper seal of the drawer in the closed position.
A known approach to minimize racking of the drawers is to synchronize the sliding movement of the opposite slide mechanisms with a rack and pinion system. Although the rack and pinion system is beneficial in minimizing the occurrence of racking, location of a shaft in the rack and pinion system is problematic in that it reduces the usable volume of the compartment for features such as bins, baskets, ice buckets, and so forth, especially when such devices are suspended above or below the drawer in a freezer compartment. In addition, rack and pinion systems can be noisy.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an anti-racking system for pull-out drawers that occupies limited space below or behind the drawer while quietly reducing racking of the drawer.